Farm bill impasse may cost shoppers

Bay State farmers, take notice: You may have to turn your clocks back at the beginning of January, but it won’t have anything to do with daylight saving time.

The rewind — figurative rather than literal — depends on whether Congress fails to reauthorize the expired Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, commonly known as the farm bill. Without new legislation governing the nation’s farm subsidy programs, the country would revert to a set of non-expiring provisions enacted in agriculture legislation during the 1930s and 1940s.

These provisions — known as “permanent law” — would force the federal government to provide mandatory financial support for certain crops and commodities at prices much higher than their market value.

“I think there are some serious consequences,” U.S Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, said of the possibility of reverting to decades-old policy. “It’s important that we address the agricultural issues that this nation faces.”

But Mr. McGovern and others are highly pessimistic that the current Congress can resolve the political standoff over the farm bill before adjourning for good at the end of this month.

The first commodity affected by the permanent law would be milk, said Chandler Goule, vice president of government relations for the National Farmers Union, a Washington-based agriculture advocacy group.

Without a new farm bill, the federal government would revert to “parity prices” — which gives a commodity its same purchasing power as it had in the early decades of last the last century. This would force the government to purchase milk at around $14 per hundredweight more than its market price, Mr. Goule noted, translating into 50 percent or higher milk price increases at the grocery store, with some estimates suggesting as much as a doubling of consumer prices.

“What you’re going to start to eventually see is higher food prices, which is also going to affect our nutrition programs and eventually it’s going to get to the consumer,” said Mr. Goule, the group’s chief lobbyist. “Your food prices will go up if we have no farm bill.”

But if farmers believe that permanent law would bring them financial gain, Mr. Goule warns that reverting to permanent law could hurt producers in the long run.

“Some of the (producers) may think they’re going to benefit because the government is being forced to purchase their product at an extremely high price,” he said. “What they don’t have is (coverage for) when their cows all get some disease and drop dead. … You have no disaster assistance; there’s no safety net.”

The Democratic-controlled Senate passed new farm legislation this summer, as did the House Agriculture Committee. But the Republican-controlled House has yet to take up the bill. In that chamber, the fight is intraparty as well as between the two parties: Some conservative Republicans feel the House Agriculture Committee bill costs too much, while many Democrats object to the severity of cuts aimed at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.

In an interview, Mr. McGovern said he has no confidence in the House to do “much of anything positive between now and the time we leave town.”

“You’ve had a Senate-passed bill that’s hanging out there for months and nobody in the (House) Republican leadership has even lifted their little finger to try to advance the cause of our farmers,” he said.

Aides to Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, did not return an email message seeking comment.

“Our list is long on issues we haven’t dealt with,” said U.S. Rep. William R. Keating, D-Bourne. “They’re lined up, no action. Yet we’re here and we can be dealing with some of these things, so it’s a period of frustration.”

“We’re doing minor, comparatively minor bills, when we could be doing some of the major bills we have to deal with,” Mr. Keating added.

Congress could avoid the looming reversion to outdated permanent law by temporarily reauthorizing the current farm bill. But this would take the pressure off Congress to come up with new farm legislation, contended Mr. Goule, whose group opposes an extension of the current farm bill.

“The reason the permanent law is there is to force Congress to act in a timely manner in order to supply rural America, farmers and ranchers with certainty,” he said. “If we do a stopgap … then we take all the pressure away from doing a farm bill. We need that pressure there to keep Congress moving.”